The Gerane Riddle
by azaneti
Summary: Valera Gerane's mother is in prison. She'd go to her father for comfort, if only she knew who he was... ON TEMPORARY HIATUS!
1. Chapter 1

ZAPHIRA AND VOLDEMORT

She was finally going to see him again. He had sent a note, asking her to meet him under the tree where they had first met. There had gone many a year since she had first seen him, her mysterious friend.

The day she first met him she had been taking a walk in the extensive woods surrounding her father's mansion. As she walked, she suddenly heard a hissing sound from a nearby thicket. She burst into a clearing and saw the origin of the hissing. A pale, handsome young man with black hair was crouching next to a poisonous green serpent, and seemed to be trying to converse with it on its own language!

The moment he heard her he whipped around with his wand out. Although he relaxed slightly and put away the wand when he saw she was only a seventeen-year-old girl, she was careful to make no threatening moves. Whatever had made him so jumpy?

"Sorry", she said out loud.

"I didnt know … I mean-I heard the hissing noise you were making and I… What are you doing in these grounds anyway?"

The man scrutinized her carefully, and his eyes rested for a moment on her wand, which poked out of her pocket.

"No, I am sorry," he said with a sudden smile.

"I have a certain fascination for snakes, and it so happens that this forest hosts a great variety of them. The hissing noise I make soothes them." After a few more hisses, the snake slid away into the underground.

"Oh," she fumbled for a moment…

"Then perhaps you would like to come up to my fathers place? He's got a humungous library with books about everything from snakes to quidditch."

He had been delighted at the idea, and the rest of the day they spent entombed under old, dusty tomes from her fathers great collection of books.

During that day they swapped life-stories and got to know each other quite well. So they met again the next day, and the day after that, until suddenly her father started setting stupid restrictions about when to be in at the evening and wanting to know the boy she went out with, and before that mess was cleared up school began again.

Next vacation when she was home, her fears had led her to believe he had forgotten her, but no, there he was again, standing beside the tree where they had first met.

They continued to see each other, sometimes every week, sometimes every month, and always he had something interesting to tell her or to show.

She on her part regaled him with wondrous stories of the many doings of her ancestors. One of them, for instance, had challenged another wizard to a duel because he had presumably told his house-elf to put bulbadock-powder in his knickerbockers! The whole thing was dreadfully complicated and ended in a great tragedy.

So, time had flown by, he became more and more friendly and she more and more in love.

Times changed, though. His visits stopped quite suddenly, about the same time The Dark Lord appeared. Mysterious disappearances and deaths became almost daily now, and when her father was put in Azkaban, convicted of death-eater activity, and later died there, she stopped thinking about anything much for a while.

All this was the reason that when she got his note and went to see him, she was totally unprepared, but not very surprised.

The person standing beneath the tree bore only faint resemblance to the handsome boy she knew. He was cloaked in black velvet that resembled dark mist, his skin was whiter than ever, his nose resembled a snake's nose and his eyes were red slits.

Yet when his eyes fell upon her, his lips parted in that familiar smile and he said with outmost courtesy,

"I am so sorry. I heard about your father and would have called on you earlier, but I'm afraid I've been rather busy."

Zaphira smiled too, but rather sadly, as the recent loss of her father still made all talk of him painful.

"I understand completely," she said, "things have been in a havoc lately. The Dark Lord is growing stronger daily…" Her voice died out as she again remembered her father.

"That is precisely what I called on you about," he told her.

"Shall we return to your manor? I have something important to tell you, and it is unsafe to linger outside in these troubled times."

He conducted her back through the forest, and once inside bolted and locked the doors. This was normal behaviour, there was after all a war on, and so Zaphira did not consider anything wrong. But when he magicked all the curtains close and asked her whether she had seen or heard anything unusual in the forest, she began to wonder.

"No, I haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary," she said, "is someone following you?"

"I'm not sure… It is best to be careful."

Satisfied that no-one but them were in the house, his face returned to the nonchalant expression of happier times.

"So- What have you been up to since my last visit?

Telling him all about her grief at her father's death and the hard times that followed seemed to help. She had not spoken to anybody about it before, and now found herself pouring out her innermost thoughts and feelings to her friend.

They ate dinner together over a lavishly set table, and both enjoyed many discussions on some of the finer points of magic.

As the dark descended, the light waned, and finally he rose to leave. Walking him to the doors she saw him steeling himself, and before Zaphira could stop herself, she blurted out:

"Would you like to stay the night?"

She fully expected him to laugh, but he only smiled ever so faintly and said

"I would be honoured." So he did.

The next morning, she woke to find the pillow besides her empty. Pulling on her magenta robes she descended the stairs and saw him peering out of the window again.

"What's going on?" she asked him, the first beginnings of fright stirring at the sight of his bleak face.

"There is something I have to tell you, something important," he said, repeating his words from the night before.

"Will you tell me," she questioned rather testily," or do I have to pry it out of you?"

He opened his mouth to retort, and… KABANG!

The door burst open.

Both their heads whipped around. A dozen ministry aurors appeared through the shambles of the former door, shooting spells all the way, and Zaphira watched in a kind of spell-induced daze as two aurors snatched her wand and conjured magical manacles for her hands, to keep her from doing wandless magic. Why had they come?

"There he is! He went that way!" At the shout most of them ran toward the stairs where, sure enough, a black cloak had just flickered out of sight.

"You are Zaphira Gerane, owner of this house?" A tense witch, one of those who had stayed behind, interrogated her.

"Why were you in the company of you-know-who?"

Zaphira gasped. Her friend through almost half her life was The Dark Lord? How could it be?!

As her heart broke into shambles, a green light flashed across the room: Zaphira's interrogator collapsed. Darkness billowed at the top of the stairs, and her friend- no, Voldemort, appeared. The ministry wizards leapt into action, but they were simply too slow. One by one they fell dead, until there was no-one left alive. Voldemort gave them hardly a glance as he made his way toward her.

Zaphira, however, could not stop looking at them. Their limp bodies lay sprawled all over the place, their faces still bearing the terrified looks which had been their last. One minute they had been alive, the next a flash of green light from her dearest friend's wand had sent them on the road to oblivion. How could he be so evil? How could he kill?

"Zaphira," the killer said, "I don't know what they told you… It does not really matter."

He turned toward her mangled door, repaired it with a flick of his ivory wand and vanished the bodies.

"I have to leave." The tall shadow watched her for a moment. "You will be all right?" That simple question set of an avalanche of not so simple feelings.

"All right? How can I be all right? You're- you're Voldemort!" She shouted at him.

"How can you leave now, after having just killed someone?! Why did-"

He silenced her quite efficiently by kissing her. For a moment their two silhouettes stood united one last time, her white-blonde hair spilling besides his dark tresses.

When she broke away he smiled that same smile.

"You always were temperamental. Now, if you will excuse me, I'm off to the Potters. I will return later."

He never did.


	2. Chapter 2

VALERA: PART ONE

**Hello, everyone! Another chappie, even though I only got one review! (Thanks, by the way...) And so I shall have to plead on my knees: Please! Please review! I need it like Ryuk needs apples! ( If you don't get the reference, check out the anime "Death Note"- it's awesome!) And in case you feel the need to comment upon it- Yes, I am aware that in some circles the name Valera is considered a boy's name. But not in this story. So there!**

Valera shivered. After ringing the doorbell one last time, her mother wrapped the cloak more closely around them and smiled sadly down at her three year old baby.

In all of Valera's short life, she had not seen her mother smile once without the mysterious sadness tainting it. Now, as her mother stood carrying her in front of a great mahogany door, the sadness seemed to have intensified to include even the grey, drizzling sky.

Even the man who finally opened the door seemed to fit in with the mood. Dressed in uniform black, he looked starch and stern to her toddler mind. The impression was confirmed by the wide-eyed look he gave her mother.

Regally dressed as always with robes in velvet the exact colour of her blue eyes, Valera's mother was a sight not easily forgotten. Valera in one hand and her wand in another, she wasn't exactly following the statute of secrecy.

The man's look, however, saw to the core, to her mother's harried eyes and the tired slump in her shoulders.

"What are you doing here?" He hissed, and countermanded himself by pulling them inside the houses grand interior.

"Not a word from you since schooldays, and now you show up with- with a baby!" The surprise and hurt on the man's face was quickly replaced by anger.

"Zaphira, whatever have you been up to? The aurors at my office say you're a death eater! Twenty aurors disappeared after entering your mansion, and some say You-know-who himself was there!"

Valera's mother collapsed into a chair with Valera on her lap.

"This is Valera, William, my daughter," she said without further aplomb.

"I've been hiding out here and there since the fall of The Dark Lord, but the aurors suddenly caught on my trail, and I didn't have anywhere else to go. Please, cousin…Please don't send us away?"

Valera watched William with fascination. He certainly seemed to be much more than her first impression had suggested, although she was slightly put out that he hadn't reacted to the introduction the same way everyone else did, namely, by melting at the very sight of her.

As she observed him, the conversation continued.

"You have changed a great deal since Hogwarts, Zaphira, and so have I. Back then I would, without a doubt, have taken you in. Now I am an auror, and you…?

I don't know what you are anymore. You come here with your baby, which I haven't heard a word about before know, with aurors hot at your heels and ask for asylum, by the way calling You-know-who The Dark Lord-only death eaters do that!"

He paused for breath, but did not continue, apparently unable to describe his conundrum any further. In the meantime, Valera's mother had risen from her chair, leaving Valera behind.

"I am no death eater, William." Her voice was heated.

"I am no mugglekiller, and neither was my father, although I admit he sympathized with the wrong side."

"What of the aurors? What happened to the ministry-trained wizards who disappeared at your place? There are too many inconsistencies, Zaphira. I am sorry, but you must leave."

Valera was three years old. She had not understood every detail of the last twenty-four hours,but she understood enough that when tears started down her mothers face, she knew things were bad.

Her approach to something bad was to cry, which in this case meant bawling at the top of her small lungs.

If nothing else, at least she came into the centre of attention again.

Mother hushed her and carried her around the room, William frowned and asked who her father was, and out of the blue someone rang the doorbell.

In a flash William grabbed them and ushered the suddenly quiet pair into the next room. They listened in silent dread as the visitors identified themselves to Cousin William, or Mr Rutherford as they called him, as aurors looking for Zaphira Gerane.

The next Valera new, they were tip-toeing out of the backdoor, which always seems to be there when the hero or heroine is in need.

Valera sighed, content at being out of the house of that horrid man. Mother sighed, and was not so happy. In fact she looked more worried than ever, and was constantly checking the dank and gloomy backyard with her ever-swivelling head.

Eventually, all she got was a split-second warning. Out of the blue, a red bolt hurtled toward them. Valera was hurled behind a garbage-bin while her mother exchanged spells with the aurors who had waited at the back.

Zaphira's ebony-black wand was blurred with the rapidness of which she put it to use. As the aurors fell back, it almost seemed as if Valera and her mother would manage to escape again.

But the sounds of combat had attracted the wizards inside William's house and they came running, just as Zaphira was about to disapparate to safety.

A jinx from behind hit mother in the shoulder, and she collapsed.

Valera could not believe her eyes. How could mother fall? Mother was invincible!

Now running toward them from all sides, the aurors confiscated mother's wand and conjured a stretcher which they levitated her onto. When mother disappeared behind a gaggle of wizards, Valera became desperate. Mother was gone! Valera had never been away from mother before, it had been too dangerous, and now she was gone!

Her heart-wrenching wail cut through the air like a siren, and alerted the entire neighbourhood of her presence. A couple of witches started toward her, but the bad man, William, reached her first.

"It's her daughter," he explained quickly to the assembly.

"I'll take care of her, she has no other family."

Carrying her into the house he rocked and hushed her.

"Hush, you are safe now, the aurors won't do you anything."

The repeated stroking over the head and his soothing voice combined to calm Valera slightly. Maybe he wasn't so bad after all. But where was mother?

"Where is ma-ma?" She asked in a trembling voice.

"Ma-ma has… Gone on a little trip, Valera," he reassured her.

"She will be all right."

Checking that the coast was clear, he navigated them up a flight of stairs and into an old, dusty nursery that clearly hadn't been used for years. Opening the window he aired out the room and placed Valera in the crib.

After he had gone, Valera was left eyeing her new domain.

Lots of toys lay scattered in the corners, colourful pictures hung on the walls and children's-books stood in droves on the multiple bookshelves. All in all, it was the perfect children's nursery.

One picture especially caught Valera's attention.

At the very top of a bookshelf, its dusty frame contained a black-and white photography of a boy who had to be William, and at his side a laughing girl with white-blonde hair and blue eyes. Valera's mother!

Smiling and waving down at her, the much younger Zaphira did not show the least sign of the sadness which had emanated from her in the last years.

The sight of her lost mother caused Valera's eyes to fill with tears again, and as if sensing the threatening situation, Mr William Rutherford himself came bounding into the room with a children's bottle full to bursting with milk.

Immediately he spotted the offending picture and flattened it so it lay face-down on the shelf. Turning toward her he smiled.

"You will have to be brave a bit longer Valera; for I'm afraid you'll be staying here with me for some time, as I am your nearest relative…

But don't worry! Although I quarrelled a bit with your mother, we were friends, and I am sure we two can become friends too."

Trough her tears, Valera smiled. Staying with William 'till her mother returned didn't seem all that bad.

And as she smiled, the sun broke through the clouds.


	3. Chapter 3

**VALERA:PART TWO**

**So... I'm obvously updating. That does not mean I will continue doing so without more reviews! Please!**

"So, young Valera," Mr Scrimgeour said genially, "beginning Hogwarts this autumn, are you?"

Valera condescended herself to answer him with a nod. Having called that afternoon at her uncle William's (so she called him, although he was more like a father) place about some business thing, Mr Scrimgeour was waiting with her in the formal livingroom.

Mr Scrimgeour was her uncle's boss, but actually they were more fast friends. Even though Valera knew him quite well, she couldn't muster any particular warm feelings for him.

He had been one of the aurors who had captured her mother.

Straightening her white-blonde hair, she settled better into her couch, fixing her dark eyes on the ancient clock on the wall. It showed the William Rutherford-arrow still standing resolutely on travelling.

Still bravely trying to keep a conversation going, Mr Scrimgeour said:

"Any idea what house you'll enter? I know your uncle was in Gryffindor."

Having decided that ignoring him was no longer an option, Valera revealed her thoughts.

"I am not certain. As you say, my uncle was a Gryffindor, and he did, after all, raise me. However, he tells me my mother favoured Slytherin! So here, I am totally confused. Perhaps I shall end up in the middle? Hufflepuff sounds a good option!"

The older man smiled, amused at her forthrightness and quick wit.

But deep down, her intelligence troubled him. Valera Gerane had, for a time, been a much debated subject at the ministry.

Her mother, Zaphira, had been the last offspring of an old and honourable pure-blood family. Zaphira's father, having succumbed to the dark arts, died in Azkaban during The War, and strange events, culminating in the disappearance of twenty aurors at the Gerane mansion, led to Zaphira's disappearance at the end of The War.

The ministry searched for her on and of, until her appearance four years later, now with her three year old infant in tow.

She was captured and sent to Azkaban after denying any death eater connections, and was still there, as far as he knew. Her cousin had graciously taken the child, and raised her as his own, and to this day no-one knew who her father was, Zaphira having refused to tell, even to the child itself.

The thought of Azkaban brought with it his reason for being here, waiting for head auror Rutherford. Just as his stomach constricted, the double doors of the livingroom swung inwards, and William appeared.

Wearing his usual black robes, he strode towards Mr Scrimgeour with a edgy expression on his face.

"What is this, Rufus? My house-elf tells me it's urgent!"

Scrimgeour looked around anxiously, but they were as alone as he could hope to be; the room was deserted except for Valera, who watched the encounter with interest.

"It's Sirius Black…He has escaped!"

This bit of news caused an interesting reaction in the faces of its two receptants. Uncle William sat down rather abruptly on the couch, suddenly white in the face, while Valera's eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

William was in a state of shock. Azkaban had been thought fool-proof for centuries. This was the first escape ever!

Valera, on the other hand, was jubilant. If Sirius Black had managed to get out, so could her mother!

Gathering his thoughts, which had run helter-skelter for a moment, William asked his superior how he could help.

"Well," Mr. Scrimgeour said, "I had hoped you would join with me to debrief the ministry and head the search. There is, after all, no auror who has more experience than you at –ehm-_ finding_ dark wizards."

He shot a glance at Valera, who was listening in on the conversation avidly. Following his gaze and thoughts, William signed for his foster-daughter to leave the room. But she did not.

Having been raised a lonely child by her rich and above all overindulgent guardian, Valera was used to getting things her way. Her uncle loved her very much, and though her manners were impeccable, he had not been overly harsh in her upbringing.

Thus, when Valera's uncle did not want her to partake in a probably very interesting discussion about Black, his whereabouts and the general inner workings of the ministry, she balked.

Upon seeing her reaction, William's face turned uncharacteristically harsh, and with a few well-chosen words he sent her running for the safety of her rooms.

Once inside the confines of her chamber, she vented her anger at the missed information by kicking a puffy chair, and succeeded in giving herself a sharp pain in her left foot.

Jumping up and down clutching it, her eyes fell upon the velvet draperies that covered the huge arched window. Through it she heard the softly hissing voice of her true confidant and long time friend, the diamond patterned snake, Zadin.

As long as she could remember Valera had been able to speak with snakes. Denying every norm she had never told her uncle. It gave her a sense of power, of knowing something not even her uncle knew.

When she, as a six-year old, overheard someone talking about "parseltongue" in hushed voices, she was grateful nobody knew. She certainly did not wish to be stamped as dark.

There was enough gossip already!

Because she had noticed the whispers, the sly glances, the sneering faces. At every family gathering and pure-blood get-together, when she was introduced, people stared. Certain folks, with Lucius Malfoy at the front, were reluctant to even speak to her.

It was not her mothers open allegiance to the dark, or her spending the last seven years in Azkaban that was frowned upon, but Valera's uncertain parentage.

Besides the fact that her great-grandmother was a Veela, and therefore not entirely human, nobody knew who Valera's father was, and therefore many were reluctant to accede to her the status of a pure-blood.

In the fanatic pure-blood upper-class society, this was an extreme social problem. Valera therefore had more than one reason to look forward to her sorting. She was hoping the sorting-hat's decision would tell her once and for all which world she belonged in.

In the meantime, however, she did not consider it beneath her to get answers of her father's identity elsewhere.

With a few hisses and snarls, Valera answered the snake's curious query as to where she had been, and gave him her orders. Collapsing in her bed with a book on wizard genealogy she had wheedled out of young Nott with a little help from her Veela magic, Valera watched Zadin vanish down the wall to spy on the conversation downstairs. She did not enjoy others concealing information.

Slamming the book shut on the extinct Gaunt-family, Valera exited the room, scooping Zadin into a pocket of her robe on the way out. It was the evening before she was to leave for Hogwarts, and the House-elves were quickly losing it trying to pack every trinket and article of clothing Valera wanted to bring along. Her uncle was probably already beginning to miss her, because he tried to keep her by his side as much as possible.

Exited as she was, Valera could not help but feel she was the only sane person left in the building- she would return at Christmas, after all, and there was always the underestimated communication-device of letters.

Diagon alley had been visited the day before, and a wand (phoenix core), robes, ingredients for potions, a cauldron, parchments and quills had all been purchased. Her uncle had even bought a black owl for her, so they could keep in touch.

It was currently perched on the top of the banister, watching in a detached kind of way the havoc downstairs. One of the house-elves, Gada by name, caught sight of the young mistress petting her owl, which had been named Artemis, at the top of the stairs.

As it squealed her name, the witch sighed.

Her uncle, who seemed to have suddenly remembered a dictionary's worth of knowledge about Hogwarts that he wanted to pass on to his young charge, had not let her out of his sight the entire day, and Valera had had to fake a sudden stomach-ache to be able to retreat to the quiet of her rooms.

No doubt, he now wished for her presence during more long-winded preparation.

But as her feet brought her into the proximity of William, she noticed an ominous air in his face, a feeling of dread that had not previously been there.

"Child," he said in a sad voice as she approached, "I fear your year at Hogwarts will be rather different from mine. The ministry has decided to place Dementors around the school grounds, to guard the students."

A shudder coursed its way down Valera's spine.

Dementors.

The very name was enough to reduce grown men to whimpering babies. Guardians of the menacing wizarding gaol Azkaban, peace and justice were still not quite the words associated with the living wraiths.

Valera herself had seen first-hand the dark influence they gained over the souls unfortunate enough to come under their thrall.

On her yearly visits to her mother, only allowed because of her uncle's high standing in the ministry, Zaphira's reaction to them was painfully evident. Eyes hidden in the dark shadows cast by her emaciated forehead, she would speak only in a hoarse whisper, and collapsed whenever a dementor passed outside her high-security cell.

That gaunt slip of a creature had created and hardened Valera's resolve to find a way, no matter the means, to free her mother.

Could their presence at her first year of school somehow impede her efforts?

Face concealing her reactions, Valera retreated quickly to her chamber, shutting out her uncle's empty platitudes and unhelpful comforts.

Zadin and Artemis, who had formed an uneasy alliance, watched from their respective perches as she fell into an uneasy sleep.


End file.
